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Comment Re:Brand necrophilia at its worst (Score 1) 81

The whole point of the C64 Ultimate is to combine what was basically about a dozen or more individual C64 retro projects into something that is consumer friendly. If you ever tried to acquire these things, you'll quickly find out they're often made in small quantities by individual hobbyists all over the world, and buying each piece separately you'll find will cost more from all the individual shipping and piece costs.

The company basically scanned the Commodore retro landscape, picked the components that were the best and most manufacturable, and built it. Then put up a company behind it where they package it into a box and then ship it around the world. Instead of someone having to piece it together from dozens of small time indivviduaals, you can basically buy it in one go with effectively free shipping and it's all integrated and ready to go.

What they are doing is capitalizing on the "Offline" part of the brand. The C64 heralds from a time when computing wasn't online and when you aren't bombarded with subscriptions and alerts and other things. And they're leaning heavily into that with the phone - you use it to communicate with others, not doomscroll.

And anyhow, putting together a real C64 already costs a fair chunk of money - working units are several hundred dollars, plus a disk drive, or other parts like an SD-IEC and adapters to modern TVs and replacement power supplies (because the originals have a tendency to short out now and provide more than 5 volts to the 5 volt line, popping all your rare and now unobtainable chips).

While I probably won't get the phone, I did buy a C64 ultimate. It's just nice having it all in one place. It has modern conveniences that get rid of the stupidly slow disk and tape loading (which were slow even when it was contemporary - basically it was software handshaking serial).

And to be fair, at least they're doing something on brand. Not like the dozens of brands bought up by Chinese companies selling all manner of crap bearing RCA, Zenith, Westinghouse and other old school brand names from companies long dead.

Comment Re:The SpaceX Valuation is Insane (Score 1) 57

You forgot third: He delivers results often enough to keep the believers believing. Tesla really is an electric car company that builds actual cars. SpaceX is actually flying rockets, and has achieved reusability, opening the door for dramatically cheaper space access.

Little of that is his own genius, but he does seem to have a knack for getting actually smart people working on visionary stuff.

Comment Re:Antropic literally asked for this (Score 3, Interesting) 37

Whether Anthropic was trying to hype about Mythos / Fable or not (and FYI, it is a pretty big leap forward), they absolutely did not want to get public access shut down. The US government very much seems to want to have exclusive access to it for now.

Also, to clarify the "jailbreak": They took open source projects that had known vulnerabilities, as well as deliberately introducing vulnerabilities into some other projects, then asked Fable to fix them, and then asked for test scripts to demonstrate that the exploits could no longer be exploited - the implication being that they could then use those exploits against unpatched systems. But what's the logic here? The challenge isn't "how to write exploits against known bugs", any model can do that. The challenge is finding the bugs - something Mythos / Fable has proven better than previous models at. Even if Fable refused to write said test scripts, it would automatically downgrade to Opus 4.8, and then *Opus* would have written those test scripts. Or any other model out there could do it, including free open source ones that can be safety-abliterated at will.

Comment Re: Enshittification marches ever onward (Score 2, Informative) 53

If it's in the CPU I bought, how should it never have had that feature that's clearly in the CPU I bought?

This is the CPU equivalent of those car makers wanting a subscription to enable the heated seats. Maybe AMD will enable it for $5 a month or something.

It's basically buying a car and having heated seats installed even if you didn't pay for them. They did it because it simplifies production. If you choose to enable it yourself, it's unsupported - so if you activate the heated seats yourself that sets your car on fire, they may not warrant the vehicle against the damage and insurance might deny coverage. And yes, usually the heated seats are just left unconnected, so people have hooked their own power connections and switches to manually turn them on and off.

Likewise, producing a a die is very expensive - it's like $100K per mask, and you need 20-30 masks per chip (so about $2-3M to produce a mask set which needs ot be done before you can make one chip). Those chips are then fused so they can be customized per requirements. So one die design can fulfill several lines of processors from low to mid to high end chips and create product differentiation.

Of course, the documentation also will usually not describe features you're not supposed to have,usually those registers are marked as "must be set to zero" and configuration registers are not documented. It's why you often find missing registers in register listings.

Enterprising people who have access often can discover hidden functionality if they try misconfiguring the register and seeing what happens. But such things are unofficial.

Of course, it's entirely possible that because to fix some bugs, they may need to disconnect some blocks so they could re-use the transistors - because often you can get away with just re-wiring the transistors rather than having to remake the entire mask set. It's what makes the difference between say, B1 to B2 steppings from B5 to C0 steppings - the B1 to B2 usually just means a metal layer rework so it's much cheaper as you only need to redo a subset of masks. When they go from B5 to C0, it usually indicates that a whole new mask set was created.

But it could easily mean that they fused out the MEU so you couldn't unofficially enable it, or maybe they borrowed the transistors to fix some other flaw.

Comment Re:Yes (Score 3, Insightful) 246

Sigh. Can you cut out the "prescribed drugs are bad because they must be bad" bullshit?

ADHD stimulants absolutely do not work as _enhancers_, as your article explains. But they are not used as enhancers, they are used as medicine to fix problems. As another example: vitamin C does pretty much nothing normally, but if you have scurvy, it's life-saving. Here's an important quote from your article:

ADHD undergraduates are capable of performing just as well in college as their non-ADHD peers, if they acquire well-established effective study habits

Which basically says: "ADHD drugs are not needed if you can fix all the symptoms of ADHD without drugs". Well, duh.

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